School reform leaves Clemente simmering

Austin students added, creating a volatile mix

Stephen Flagg boards the No. 70 bus near his Austin home early one morning with classmates and travels east along Division Street through his African-American community.

The bus cruises into the heavily Latino neighborhoods of Humboldt Park and West Town, passing under the massive metal Puerto Rican flags that arch Division, and drops the teenagers at Clemente High School.

Though it is eight months into the school year, Flagg, 16, who attends Clemente because his neighborhood school was closed for poor performance, says he still does not feel comfortable at his new, mainly Latino school.

"They don't want us here. We don't want to be here," he said. "Everybody is different, and that's why everybody is fighting."

Since Chicago school officials began phasing out Austin High School two years ago and dispersing hundreds of teenagers to crosstown Clemente, violence has invaded the hallways and spilled across campus. Student morale has plummeted. And racial tensions--already simmering under the surface--have bubbled over.

This year, nine teachers, an assistant principal and two deans were threatened or hit. Students were stabbed, choked and robbed, school reports show. A schoolyard brawl sucked in 40 students.

Amid all this, the principal of 10 years abruptly quit in March without a specific reason.

Two years after Chicago officials began shutting low-performing high schools and moving students to nearby campuses as part of Renaissance 2010 reforms, the crime rate at five of the nine schools that received the bulk of students has shot up. The migration of teenagers across racially isolated neighborhoods, through gang boundaries and into schools where they often are culturally or racially different from classmates, has burdened a high school system already struggling to educate students.

The turbulence underscores the difficulty in reforming high schools, a task that has become a national obsession.

Chicago has shut nine elementary schools in five years, shifting thousands of pupils into new schools in new neighborhoods. Few problems surfaced.

But high schools are far more complicated.

They are filled with adolescents negotiating a painful path between independence and reliance on adults. Peer influences are strong, and navigating a school culture and its cliques can be tough for teens. Shifting in new kids from a different neighborhood--not to mention a different race--can upset that equilibrium.

"Given all that teenagers already are dealing with, asking them to navigate a whole new social structure is going to stress them out," said Leslie Santee Siskin, a New York University professor who has spent 15 years researching high schools and high school reform.

David Pickens, who oversees school closings for the Chicago Public Schools, acknowledges that the district could have done a better job helping high schools with the transitions, but said they are more prepared for next year. The district has set aside $1 million to assist schools absorbing new students and will cap the number of transfers.

"We've learned a lot from what has happened this year," Pickens said.

Even before the Austin students arrived, Clemente was simmering.

The school, an eight-story glass and brick building at Division and Western Avenue, has long been an extension of the community. Named after Puerto Rican baseball hero Roberto Clemente, the campus anchors the Fiesta Boricua, a Puerto Rican heritage festival that stretches down Division. In 1990 nearly 60 percent of the student body was Puerto Rican.

But in the 1990s, Mexicans flooded into Humboldt Park, West Town and Logan Square. Last year, Puerto Ricans made up only 36 percent of Clemente's enrollment. Mexicans constituted 31 percent.

Many Mexican students say they are looked down on and treated differently from their Puerto Rican classmates.

A few years ago, the school's Mexican club organized its own prom, after some Mexican students complained that the disc jockeys played hip-hop and rap preferred by Puerto Ricans, while they prefer Duranguense music. Some complain that the school offers more support to the baseball team, composed mainly of Puerto Ricans, than it does to the soccer team, made up mainly of Mexicans.

"This is our school too, but we feel like we are not welcome," said Leonardo Delvalle, a Guatemalan senior soccer player.

On top of this stew of racial and cultural division, the school system instituted Renaissance 2010.

Though Austin students began transferring two years ago, problems did not surface until this year, when their enrollment hit 250, school officials said.

By early October, gang warfare erupted. School officials, security guards and students say the Gangster Disciples from Austin warred with the Latino Vice Lords and Lovers for control of the school. Students were jumped outside the school as they exited for fire drills. Fistfights broke out in the hallways.

Only a small portion of the school's 2,400 students were involved in the violence, but it put a dark cloud over the school.